for sure... unfortunately we'll never know. (but i'd hazard an educated guess the growth trend would have continued--population increase alone would have more or less guaranteed that...)

Quote:

Originally Posted by Deleted 0833250

Are you all just living in denial or are you basing your assumptions on another graph? The growth trend plateaus and begins to decline at 96...pre-Napster...

I think it would have probably declined like it did, maybe not as sharply though. Many of the mid-90s bands started to struggle in the late 90s, there was this whole feeling that the party was over. Whether that was a reaction to the rise of the internet or a shift in tastes away from guitar music I can't work out. In the UK in 1999 they were saying rock was dead, yet two years later the Strokes and White Stripes came along and indie garage rock revival was king.